The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish

by Dido Butterworth

  Archie grinned and covered his nakedness with a bark lap-lap. Then he dashed out the door. He was headed towards the yam gardens, his bare feet beating a frantic tattoo on the burning sand. Round one last corner and he saw her. She was bent almost double, and with each thrust of the yam-stick her withered breasts flapped against her chest.

  ‘Auntie Balum,’ he cried as he saw the woman who had cared for him as tenderly as any mother could. Balum stretched upright, one hand in the small of her back while she steadied herself with the stick. She’d been a beauty in her youth. Even now her almond eyes, delicate nose and shapely mouth were arresting. For a few moments her tattooed face remained blank, as if she couldn’t understand why he was there. But then her sweet visage collapsed with grief.

  ‘My son. My son is gone,’ she wailed. ‘My son is gone, gone from my sight!’

  It was the traditional dirge for a young man slain in battle.

  ‘Auntie. I must go home. I told you that when I first arrived. But I will be back.’ Archie’s eyes filled with tears as he cradled her slight body in his arms. He knew he was lying.

  An hour later the steamer was inside the lagoon. It was time for Archie to go. He was desperately sad to be leaving his island family. It felt like a sort of death. But if he didn’t leave now he would never see his fiancée Beatrice again. He had written to her at every opportunity. Letters had piled up waiting for a passing vessel. And she had written back. He imagined her beautiful face concentrating as she crafted each sentence, her glorious blonde locks flowing over her shoulders, her exquisite hands delicately holding her pen. And with every loving letter he’d received from her, his confidence had grown. In his last missive, sent by canoe and then native runner to the nearby mission, he had proposed marriage. He felt certain of a positive response. But just to be doubly sure he had enclosed his foreskin love-token with the letter. And now, in just a few weeks, he would fall into her arms, and a new life would begin.

  ‘Get yer arse aboard!’ the bosun screamed above the creak of the windlass. ‘The fuckin’ tide’s turned. If we don’t shift now we’ll be spending the night with the bloody cannibals!’

  The island lads were warily clambering up the rope ladders slung over the side of the SS Mokambo, somehow balancing Archie’s crates on their shoulders as they went. At the rail, equally wary sailors took the crates aboard. The great war canoe had already been winched out of the water. As Archie climbed a rope boarding ladder its outrigger swung wildly, threatening to knock him back into the water. There was no time to say goodbye. He barely had time to wave before he heard the shout ‘up anchor’, and the tramp steamer began moving, leaving the cluster of outriggers and their forlorn paddlers in its wake.

  By dusk Great Venus was a mere smear on the horizon, and West Venus Atoll, home of the famous fetish, was close a-starboard. In the gloaming Archie could just about make out the ceremonial path, lined with the ochred valves of giant clam shells, leading in from the beach. There was not a light to be seen on the place: the Venus Islanders would rather die than set foot there after dark.

  The last of the tropical twilight faded, and Archie went to his cabin. A small mirror hung on one wall. What he saw in it shocked him: a brown man, muscular, trim and tattooed, dressed in nothing but a skimpy loincloth. The trunk containing his clothes had been placed beside his bunk. He opened it for the first time in years, took out his suit, felt its fabric, and at once remembered his nickname—Beanpole Meek. That, and his brothers’ habit of pointing out his ‘Bondi chest’ (far from Manly) had been perpetual humiliations.

  Archie dropped his loincloth and struggled into his trousers. He tugged at them and heard a ripping sound. His right thigh had burst through the seams. Next he struggled into his shirt. It seemed to belong to a child. Surely a fellow couldn’t change that much between nineteen and twenty-four? Perhaps the fabric had shrunk. In any case, the captain’s wife might be able to help.

  ‘I can put gussets in them, but there’s not a lot of spare fabric, she said dubiously. Her gaze drifted from Archie’s body to the suit and shirt lying in her lap.

  ‘Do you think you could try? I mean, I can’t arrive home looking like this.’

  ‘You’re not too hard on the eyes. But I suppose you’ll need clothes in the city. Leave it with me. I’ll fix up something.’

  The captain invited his passenger to dine with him most evenings. Archie was surprised at how difficult he found it to have a conversation. He just couldn’t find the words he wanted—in English at least. The captain seemed taken with a young cricketer called Bradman. Even though Archie followed cricket keenly, the name meant nothing to him. And both the captain and his wife kept talking about ‘the crash’. He assumed they were referring to some terrible rail tragedy, until it became clear that it was about money. Lots of money.

  Ten days later, with Archie only dimly aware of changes in the wider world, the Mokambo steamed into Sydney Harbour. She passed through the heads in the dead of night, and the first Archie knew of being home—if that’s indeed where he was—was the stench of coal smoke. He sat on deck in the predawn darkness, observing the city lights through the grimy atmosphere.

  It had been, he recalled, Professor Radcliffe-Brown who’d encouraged him to go to the Venus Isles. He had the ear of both the museum’s director, Dr Vere Griffon, and Cecil Polkinghorne, the museum’s anthropologist, to whom Archie had been apprenticed. And so, just four years after having arrived at the museum as a fifteen-year-old cadet, Archie was granted study leave to go to the islands.

  The Venus Isles had a bad reputation. But in 1911 the Reverend E. Gordon-Smythe had brought Christ to the natives, and it was generally believed that headhunting had been curbed, if not entirely eliminated. Most families would have been concerned to see their son shipping for such a place, but the Meeks were a hard, unsympathetic people. He couldn’t remember hearing a kind farewell from his parents, or from his four brothers.

  ‘Study the culture, Archie. Note everything, and bring a rational, detached mind to your work,’ Radcliffe-Brown advised. It only now dawned on Archie that, instead, he’d lived the culture. But he had done one important thing. He’d made a collection. And what a collection it was!

  Chapter 2

  As the sun rose over South Head, Archie made arrangements to clear his collection and personal effects through customs, and he set off in his ridiculously small, patched suit, on a leisurely meander towards the museum. After five unconstrained years his feet were so broad that his shoes pinched him wickedly, forcing him to adopt a strange, limping gait. People stared as he passed. Brown-skinned with hair uncut, he felt—and looked like—a stranger in his own city.

  Had he forgotten, or perhaps never realised, how bleak it all was? There were no trees—no plants but weeds to soften the bare asphalt, dilapidated houses and overhead tangles of poles and wires. Even Hyde Park looked naked, its southern end turned into a morass by construction works for a new war memorial. He remembered the endless fundraising and planning for the monument, and was glad to see that building had commenced.

  In front of the stately Burns Philp building stood a slender figure, balanced on short sticks and with a dead bird perched on its head. Its face was flawless, as pale as a corpse, and its fingernails and lips were as red as if dipped in fresh blood. Unnervingly, its eyes were surrounded with a strange purple
glow. It took Archie a moment to realise that she was only a very fashionable young lady, albeit heavily made up, wearing high heels and a bird-of-paradise hat. He wanted nothing more than to grab Sangoma and shout, ‘Look at that, Uncle! You think you look fine with a pig’s tusk stuck through your nose and a few tattoos on your face. Well, it’s we Sydney people who really know how to dress up! Just look at that young woman. Now, she is flash!’

  The more Archie saw, the more he became amazed. In Macquarie Street there’d been a noticeable shift from hansom cabs to motor vehicles. And the men, in their grey suits and fedoras, moved like autumn leaves before the storm. He saw a banker with an expensive briefcase, a doctor with his trademark Gladstone bag, and a ritual leader in his black cassock.

  At last Archie reached the museum. He paused before its column-flanked entrance. The place was a temple to nature, modelled along classical lines and constructed in a golden age when upstart colonies had vied to impress the motherland. Its doors, tradition had it, were tall enough to admit a brontosaurus, and wide enough for a blue whale.

  Archie’s eye caught a movement. A sparrow hopped in the roadway, its confidence and smart black bib making it as much a city slicker as the banker with his briefcase. The bird looked Archie brazenly in the eye, then plunged its beak into a steaming pile of horse shit. ‘You cheeky fellow!’ Archie said as it flew off with its tidbit. Introduced birds—sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and rock pigeons—were everywhere. But hardly a native was to be seen.

  Archie stepped over the threshold and strode the black-and-white tiles of the great hall. Slanting beams of light from a roof lantern caught the dust and transformed it into a glittering fog. The galleries were not yet open to the public. The high, empty space echoed with his footfalls.

  The day was setting itself up to be a scorcher and the hall was filled with the scent of what most would gloss as eau de museum. Archie savoured the old preserving alcohol with its fruitiness, aliquot of cloying formaldehyde, and fishy high note given off by the pickled sea creatures immersed therein. The tang of lacquer from the stuffed Murray cod registered on his palate, while the dun dustiness of old bones coated his throat. But what was that other smell? The smoky, sweaty aroma of the inside of a stone-age hut coming from the New Guinean artefacts was so familiar that it went almost undetected.

  He passed under the skeleton of a great whale suspended from the roof, its vertebrae strung on a straight iron rod. On hot days the oil that mottled its bones liquefied. Sometimes a splash would materialise—like a drop of blood from a holy statue—on what was claimed to be the skeleton of the last Tasmanian. The remains hung beside the bones of a gorilla and a chimpanzee, each suspended from a wire that passed through a hole in the top of its cranium. Their arms hung limply by their sides, their toes pointed earthwards. They looked like gibbeted criminals.

  In the middle of the hall was a cylindrical glass bottle refulgent in a shaft of light. It contained the cigar-sized egg-case of a giant Gippsland earthworm. Archie could see the solitary embryo floating in its exquisitely translucent, golden case. Unborn, it was already twice the size of a common worm. Nearby stood a glass cabinet that lacked the accumulated grime of ages. It had not been there when he’d left. Inside were minerals, one of which formed a white, silken sheet that resembled the décolletage of a young woman, across which were scattered a soupçon of pea-sized, rose-red crystals. Its beauty held him spellbound. Surely the display was the work of that indefatigable curator, Dr Elizabeth Doughty. Her looks and energy had frightened him when he was a cadet. But then he heard her rhapsodising in the tea room about the beauty of tourmaline and the intricacies of malachite, and she became in his eyes the paragon of what he hoped one day to become—a museum curator.

  He had once thought the exhibition the grandest thing in the world. But now it seemed forlorn. Bull roarers, bones, barnacles, butterflies and boomerangs all in random proximity—objects enough to make the tremendous space look cluttered. What, he wondered for the first time in his life, was it all for?

  Then he remembered Cecil Polkinghorne’s words when giving his new cadet a tour of the institution. ‘Here,’ he had spluttered, gesturing grandly towards the collection, ‘lies the collective memory of our people. Objects may languish unstudied or forgotten for a century or more. But rest assured that one day, in response to the needs of the times, a curator will take up an object, and in it trace indisputable proof of the way things once were. Here, history finds its physical testimony.’

  Archie arrived at the director’s office before he was fully prepared. He hesitated, trying to recall the speech he’d practised on the boat. Just as he raised his arm to knock, the door swung open. Dryandra Stritchley, the director’s secretary, flinched, seemingly horrified by the nut-brown stranger with his right arm elevated as if holding a knobkerrie. Her bearing was as upright as a sergeant-major’s, and she was as slender as ever. Her elegant if slightly severe face, grey eyes and sensible clothing were all unchanged. Only the knot of greying hair hinted at the time passed. When she recognised him she quickly regained her composure. ‘Meek. It’s you at last! The director’s waiting for you. He’s been waiting for some time. Two years to be precise,’ she said archly. ‘And don’t dare show your face here again before you get a new suit. And a haircut.’

  She led Archie through the boardroom. The space was spectacularly large, almost ballroom-sized. The director’s desk sat on a raised platform at one end. On the lower level stretched an oval cedar table surrounded by thirteen chairs. One—the chairman’s carver—was ornate and twice as tall as the rest. Moving briskly forward, Miss Stritchley failed to notice that Archie had stopped mid-stride, his mouth agape. He was staring at something on the wall.

  ‘The Great Venus Island Fetish,’ he whispered.

  Painted in white, red and black ochre, the heart-shaped face was carved with crazed, spiky lines that told of its maker’s dangerous insanity. The nose, with its wide-open nostrils, sat above a great slash of a mouth filled with jagged, blackened, pigs’ teeth. But these were not what one first noticed. It was the eyes. Bloodshot. Manic. Hypnotic. They had been fashioned from pearl-shells smeared with red ochre, the irises blackened spirals made from cone shells. They pulled at Archie’s soul as powerfully as a vortex.

  Among the thirty-two human skulls decorating its margin were the last mortal remains of the passengers and crew of HMS Venus, which had run aground on the uncharted islands during the great cyclone of 1892, and, incidentally, given them their European name. The object had caused quite a stir when it arrived in Sydney. Legend has it that the Anglican bishop thundered from the pulpit that it should be burned, and the skulls sewn onto it given a Christian burial. It was only the popular notion that the heads belonged to heathen Chinese, bound for the Queensland goldfields, that had allowed it to go to the museum, skulls attached.

  Archie was unaware that, all along, the director had been watching him. Vere Griffon had shed his jacket, removed his bow tie, and undone the top two buttons of his shirt. But the spats remained in place, as did his starched collar. The slightly dishabille look, he felt, suited his Grecian physique. This mattered to him, even when alone. He could certainly afford the look in the presence of an inferior. On the desk before him were a dozen perfect red roses in a vase. As he watched Archie, he recalled the worst day of his life—the fundraising dinner of six months earlier.

  Griffon never though
t he’d need to beg for money. When he arrived in Sydney in ’23 he’d been hailed as ‘the wizard of Cambridge’, and there’d been no end to government largesse. But all that finished with the stock-market crash. After that, his only hope of keeping the museum afloat lay in courting wealthy patrons. The trouble was, every cultural institution in the city was chasing the same small clique of philanthropists.

  Chumley Abotomy, a new board member, had offered to host a dinner. In his late thirties, ruddy-nosed, paunchy and hairy-eared, Abotomy was an archetypical colonial country squire. He was rough, coarse, loud, and very nouveau riche. His small eyes had a sparkling elusiveness that made them transfixing. Vere Griffon had been seated next to Abotomy’s fiancée, the divine Portia Clark. He studied her image, reflected upside down in his silver soup spoon, before deciding that her wistful expression bore a striking resemblance to that of Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell.

  Abotomy sat at the head of a splendid table, lit with candles and laid with entreés of jellied trout and devilled eggs. Griffon wondered why Abotomy had seated Lord Bunkdom rather than him on his right. Most of Sydney had suspicions about Bunkdom’s title. But there he was, goggle eyes swivelling madly as Abotomy held forth about his country estate.

  As Griffon listened to Abotomy big-noting himself, his bonhomie began to evaporate. By the time dessert was served, it was clear Abotomy would not invite him to speak on the urgent need for donations to complete the new hall of evolution. Nor would he turn the conversation towards the institution’s many other pressing financial requirements. With his jaw clenched so tightly it hurt, Griffon scanned the table. Elizabeth Doughty, whom he had invited in the hope she might inspire Sir Hercules Robinson to donate some valuable gemstones, had come in a hunting hat and tweed trousers that were a positive parody of femininity. She might be coaxing a donation, but judging from her claxon-like tone and Sir Hercules’ twitching moustache, she was more likely elaborating on the deficiencies of the museum’s administration. As a board member, Hercules could do damage with such information.